Can You Work With No Internet?

A businesswoman traveling by plane pulls out her smartphone and is able to read and respond to emails, even though her phone is in Airplane Mode and not connected to the Internet.

A college student spends much of his commute traveling by subway underground, yet he can still catch up on news from his smart watch.

A wind turbine engineer goes out into a remote field with a tablet in hand — a mobile device that can be used to obtain and enter data from the turbines and share with the company’s Industrial Internet platforms later.

“Consumers and users of mobile apps are demanding apps that work all the time,” said Wayne Carter, chief architect of mobile at Couchbase, where he leads the vision, strategy, and development of the company’s mobile solutions. “Spinners that spin and you just wait — those days are numbered.”

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Indeed, like magic, mobile databases allow apps to perform both online and offline, in any environment, Internet connection or not, based on the way data is stored, accessed and processed in the Cloud.

“Mobile databases that support disconnected operation provide a better user experience for the average person,” said Andy Pavlo, assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University.

With mobile databases in the backend, “a person may never know that they were intermittently disconnected from the Internet because the application was able to behave normally,” said Pavlo.

Pavlo cautions, however, that “there will always be some applications that can never support this type of disconnected mode. The best example would be something like a bank; they can't have you transfer money between two accounts while you're disconnected because they need to make sure you actually have enough money to do that operation.”

Carter said the goal of companies like Couchbase is to make it easier for developers to create “apps that are more delightful, amazing experiences,” without having to worry about traditional database management.

“We are changing what you see and how fast you see it,” said Carter, enabling apps that allow “the ability to do your job, drive revenue and capture social experiences in any conditions, not just when you have an Internet connection.”